Science and Technology Innovation Program

Budget Hero Wins Site of the Week

Online game lets students slash, tax their way to balanced budget

University of Maryland (UM) College Park students last week finagled with federal spending and deficit reduction so that, at the very worst, they could delay economic Armageddon in the United States.

UM students, most of them majoring in public policy, experimented with ways to get the country’s fiscal house in working order Sept. 19 during the launch of “Budget Hero: Election Edition,” a web-based game that invites players to find ways to trim the nation’s debt by raising taxes, doing away with certain tax deductions, raising the age of Social Security recipients, and reining in the defense budget, among dozens of options.

Even allowing the country to fall off the proverbial fiscal cliff—a combination of economic policies dreaded by both major parties—would keep the government running until well into 2027, according to the game.

But simply delaying the economic Armageddon isn’t the point, said Diane Tucker, leader of the serious games initiative at the nonpartisan Wilson Center, which created the game and introduced the election-year edition in College Park and on Capitol Hill last week.

The game aims to better inform students and the general public of the federal government’s financial obligations reaching into the next few decades—projections based on information from the Congressional Budget Office, the referee of partisan bickering surrounding economic policy in Washington, D.C.

“Numbers don’t lie,” said Tucker, who added that most Budget Hero players have deeply flawed understandings of how the government spends money. “I think there’s a way to do this so that it helps clear some of the fog around these complex issues. People’s understanding of where their money is going suffers from such enormous distortion. … There’s something very leveling about this. There have been highly partisan debates around these issues, and this will show in numbers how money stacks up.”

Budget Hero, she added, is “the best kind of teaching tool, a simulation where people can make mistakes and learn from them. They move from passive recipients of information to interactors with that information. That expands their understanding of the role they can play.”